Giants Grave, Cornaville, Co. Meath
Co. Meath |
Megalithic Tombs
On a south-westerly slope in Cornaville, County Meath, a large mound of stones sits quietly in the landscape, carrying the kind of local name that signals an old unease with explaining what something actually is.
Giants Grave is the folk attribution; the archaeological reality is a Neolithic court-tomb, one of a class of megalithic monuments built in Ireland roughly five thousand years ago, in which a roofed stone gallery was fronted by an open ceremonial forecourt, or court, where the living could gather to attend to the dead.
The monument takes the form of a subrectangular cairn, measuring approximately forty metres along its north-west to south-east axis and fifteen metres across, a substantial pile of stone that has nonetheless surrendered much of its original structure to time. Incorporated within the north-western end of the cairn are the surviving remains of the tomb's gallery, which runs to around six metres in length and just over two metres in width, divided into three chambers. A single court stone remains exposed to the north of the entrance jambs, a lone survivor of what would originally have been a more elaborate curving façade designed to frame the entrance to the tomb. George Eogan, who recorded the site in 1958, documented these details at a point when the monument's condition was already long settled into what visitors see today.